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Issue 10: Sheriff Tharp Believes A New Jail Is Absolutely Necessary for Lucas County

By Fletcher Word
Sojourner’s Truth Editor

Sherriff John Tharp has been in office for six years but very little has changed in his assessment of the jail that his office overseas. “When I started I saw that we needed a new jail,” he recalls. “It was in dire straits – so many repairs needed – in the pipes, the roof leaking, the cold floors, the steamed windows. The situation is not good for the people who have to live here and also for the employees – it’s not good.”
 

In fact, there is virtually nothing about the facility that pleases the sheriff, including the way it’s built. “It’s built like a hotel,” he says. “With large foyers on each floor, a lot of wasted space with wings to the left and right.” Those wings, says Tharp, mean that officers cannot have direct supervision over all the inmates in their care.

So almost immediately after he came into office, Tharp started beating the drums for a new facility. He came up with a downtown location in order to bring it to the Lucas County Commissioners for their consideration. He and his staff took a look around and saw what they thought was an ideal location that would be convenient and would also beautify the large part of downtown – walking paths connecting courthouses, a pond here and there.

When the plan made sense, he took it to the commissioners for their appraisal and they took a serious look at it, he says. And their serious look included an estimate of the financial costs. Those costs analyses placed the possibility of building a new jail downtown well out of reach, Tharp realized as the downtown expenses were explained “It was way beyond affordable,” says Tharp. “Just paying for a parking lot, we would have had to pay for the lot and then for the owner’s investment of loss income over the years.”

After dealing with the financial problems of staying downtown, the sheriff had to come with grips of the relative inconvenience of relocating the jail to the far reaches of the city. For his officers, the convenience of being downtown comes primarily from the ease of transporting inmates, as they do now, without having to place them in vehicles. However, if the jail had been built at his initially preferred location downtown, says Tharp, his deputies would still have had to transport inmates via vehicles rather than walking them as they do now.

“Whether it’s from a football field away or seven miles, we still have to bus them,” he notes. “And [in the area away from downtown] there’s ample parking and room to add on if necessary.”

On the other hand, as he surveyed the other law enforcement officials – state, federal, Lucas County – who have to use the jail, he heard overwhelming support for a new facility and the location wasn’t much of an issue. Most could see significant advantage from not having to deal with downtown traffic and the difficult wait times the old facility presents.

In addition Tharp is very excited about the Behavioral Health Solution Center, the facility that will be used to place those individuals who are impaired due to mental illness or drug abuse and may not have committed crimes. As a longtime street cop, Tharp remembers how often he would have to confront someone who might be mentally impaired and was conflicted with the fact that he had no other resort than to take him or her to jail.

“Many, many times I would run into a situation like that,” he recalls. “Now an officer will have a place to take such an individual.”

A new facility is what the sheriff has been working toward for all these years.

“I gotta get our people into a new jail; I gotta get our inmates into a new jail.”

 


 

 

   
   


Copyright © 2018 by [The Sojourner's Truth]. All rights reserved.
Revised: 10/25/18 09:20:16 -0400.


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